Many businesses employ cashiers that interact with customers and handle transactions with customers. Cashiers are often directed as part of their employment to engage in various types of dialog with customers. For example, a cashier may greet a customer, verify what the customer has ordered by reading the order back to him, inquire as to whether the customer is satisfied and provide other verbal (spoken) messages to the customer. Such verbal messages are typically intended to increase customer satisfaction and/or sales.
In many business environments, an important function of a cashier is to provide verbal messages which are offers that the customer may accept or reject, such as an offer for an item the customer has not ordered. One type of offering system is a computer-determined “suggestive sell”. U.S. Pat. No. 5,353,219 describes a system for selecting items that a cashier may suggest for a customer to purchase at conventional item prices. Providing offers can increase sales and thereby increase the average profit gained per transaction. In particular, if more offers are provided, the average number of acceptances of such offers will be greater.
Although the business benefits if the cashier provides the proper verbal messages to customers, the cashier typically has little incentive to do so. Accordingly, the cashier will typically provide the proper verbal messages inconsistently or not at all. It is extremely difficult or impossible to assure that the cashier has properly provided an appropriate verbal message for every transaction. For example, in the current environment a manager cannot monitor every transaction of every cashier under his supervision to assure that the cashier makes an offer or otherwise provides the proper verbal message.
It would also be advantageous to determine whether cashiers have appropriately provided verbal messages to customers and to assure that verbal messages were appropriately provided to customers.